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Research overview

Research Interests

Professor Meg Twycross is Executive Editor of the journal Medieval English Theatreand its associated publications, and has published widely on medieval theatre. Her book, written with Dr Sarah Carpenter of Edinburgh University, on Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Ashgate, 2002) won the 2004 David Bevington Award for the best book in Early Drama Studies. In March 2001 she was presented with a festschrift in her honour entitled Porci ante Margaritam. She is editing a collection of essays on the latest work on the manuscript of the Towneley Plays, and amassing a body of work on Tudor allegorical theatre.

Since 1993/94 she has been involved with the use of computers in Humanities research and teaching: see e.g. the AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminars. Her latest investigations apply forensic document-examination and virtual-restoration techniques to high-resolution digital scans of manuscripts. Her two main objects are the 1415 York Ordo paginarum, where she has managed to retrieve writing which was scraped out and overwritten in the 1510s and even earlier (see Medieval English Theatre vol. 25); and the manuscript Journals of George Fox, contributing, with Hilary Hinds and Alison Findlay, to the project on Early Quakers in the North Westwhose website is going online in instalments.

She also specialises in medieval iconography and in the meticulous research recreation of medieval performance conditions in great halls and in the streets, including the organisation of two pageant-waggon sequences along part of the original route of the York Mystery Plays for the York festivals of 1988 and 1992. Her latest was a recreation with Elisabeth Dutton of Lydgate’s Mumming for the Mercers of London (1429/30) at the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium in July 2012. Her videos made with Lancaster University Television have been digitised and are used widely for teaching. She is also involved with the EDOX (Early Drama at Oxford) project.

Her research into the origins of 'true processional' staging also involves investigating the pictorial and archival evidence of pageant waggons and theatrical processions in the Southern Low Countries, especially Leuven in Belgium.

Meg Twycross has an MA, B.Litt, and Cert Ed from the University of Oxford, where she was College Lecturer at Worcester College and St Edmund Hall before coming to Lancaster in 1974.